A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) (16 page)

“
This is yours.”

“
I actually Googled that. You’re only supposed to give it back if it’s an heirloom. It’s not, so it’s yours.”

“
I can’t keep it,” she said, with a hint of the emotion he didn’t see on her face. “I’m the one who—”

“
It would have ended anyway.” She looked startled at that, and he let out a small laugh. “Come on, Celia. You know it would have. In all the time we were engaged, you never set a date for the wedding. You kept changing the subject. And I hadn’t been happy for a long time. We can stand here and blame you for it if you want, but that’s not really fair. You gave us both a way out. You picked the guy I couldn’t pretend I was okay with.” He moved toward her then and closed her hand over the ring, accepting the bittersweet thing that worked in him then, like sorrow. But softer. “Keep it. I don’t want it.”

“
Griffin—”

“
Why don’t you sit down?”

He
moved to the sofa across from her and waited for her to ease herself down, like she was afraid either the pillows below her were breakable or she was. Maybe they both were, he thought. If he regretted anything, it was that he’d never understood that until now. She deserved better. But then, so did he.

“
Don’t worry,” he said when he saw the expression on her face, the way she struggled to compose herself, “the hard part is over. This is about the business. And I think you’re going to like what I have to say.”

Margery
’s wedding day dawned cold. Winter cold.

In the tradition of Montana
’s capricious springs, the temperatures had plummeted with little warning the night before and the land glittered with an unexpected frost come the morning. Emmy had spent the night—the last two nights, in fact—sleeping on the couch in Gran Harriet’s study with an inadequate selection of blankets, which meant she had a long stretch of peace and quiet, gazing out over the chilly land framed in Gran’s huge central window and deliberately not thinking about a freaking thing, before she heard someone pad up beside her.

She knew it was Margery
even before her sister sighed. She accepted the mug of coffee Margery handed to her and then they stood like that for a moment, their shoulders brushing and their eyes on the sweep of lawn out in front that rolled down toward the white tent on the bluff. Marietta looked small and cozy down below on the valley floor, with chimneys puffing out smoke here and there beneath clouds that Emmy wasn’t going to point out looked a whole lot like snow.

“
I suppose I had this coming,” Margery said philosophically. “Mom told me to do this in August when we could be reasonably sure of the weather but I refused to get married in all that humidity. I didn’t want to be sweating like a pig in all my photos. It never occurred to me I might have to wear a parka instead.”

“
On the bright side,” Emmy pointed out, “you’ll look particularly cute in a wedding dress with a parka on top.”

“
I certainly will,” Margery said, a smile in her voice if not on her face. “Which is what matters.”

“
That and the love, of course.”

Margery
’s shoulder pressed hers that little bit harder. “And that.”

And Emmy decided she didn
’t have any time to think about that deep note of contentment in her sister’s voice, or reflect on how little of that was likely to sound in her own, because there was a raucous family breakfast to sit through. Within an hour of her getting up there were cousins and aunts and uncles chattering in every available room. Guests stopped by to drop off gifts. Emmy took delivery of the flowers from the very nice Risa, the new owner of the florist’s shop in town. She helped her mother put the final touches on the centerpieces and oversaw the placement of all those vanity chocolates in their pretty copper boxes.

She
was already worn out when she retreated to the farthest reaches of the finished basement downstairs in search of a dog toy Gran Harriet was certain had been left there and needed immediately, for some reason, to find her father smoking one of the cigars he’d been supposed to give up years ago.

“
Busted,” she said.

Her father rolled his expressive eyes
and blew a stream of smoke out of an open storm window.

“
If a man can’t have a cigar on his daughter’s wedding day, when can he have one?”

“
An argument you clearly didn’t make with Mom or you wouldn’t be hiding in the basement,” Emmy said dryly.

Her father only smiled.
“Marriages are only strengthened by the secrets we pretend to keep,” he said. “She will pretend not to smell my sin on my clothes and I’ll pretend it didn’t happen and this, my darling girl, is how we’ve remained together for thirty years.”

“
Lying?” She couldn’t help herself, then. She thought that if lying was what it took for a happy marriage then Celia—the astoundingly attractive Celia, a small fact no one had mentioned—and Griffin must be destined for deep and abiding bliss, and it made her want to scream. Or break things. “And here I would have thought lying was a bad thing.”

“
Lying
is
a bad thing,” her father said. “No one’s lying. But the deliberate decision to choose
not
to bring up something that will only cause a fight? That’s marital harmony right there. You’ll see.”

She decided not to tell him that she very much doubted she ever would.

Emmy had spent the past two days in a state of numbness. She’d walked out of the Italian restaurant in town after Celia’s appearance and had found herself staring up blankly at St. James’s Church while the spring evening stayed blue and bright—when all she wanted was to be hidden away in shadows. Hidden somewhere so far away that what had happened inside the restaurant couldn’t touch her.

She
’d found herself wandering the streets of Marietta like this was some kind of country song, and had acted like she’d meant to be there when she’d run into some of her cousins outside of Gray’s Saloon. She’d eaten dinner and smiled and drank a little too much beer, and then, when her cousins had dropped her off at the cabin, she’d sat on the couch in the great room and stared at all the places she and Griffin had come together.

It was going to be fine, she
’d told herself. Griffin and Celia needed to talk about some things, obviously, but then he’d come home and they’d finish the conversation they’d started in the restaurant, and everything would be
fine.

But when she
’d woken up the following morning, her head had pounded and her mouth had been too dry. She was still on the couch, in a weird position that suggested she’d simply slumped to one side there, and she was still in the clothes she’d worn out the night before.

And Griffin wasn
’t there.

She
’d packed up her things on autopilot, she’d stood in the shower and forced back all the memories of sharing it with him, and she’d told herself she should have known better. This was what he did. He always left when it would hurt her the most. Always. How had she managed to forget that?

She supposed she should count herself lucky that she
’d actually left that restaurant last night still wearing her clothes.

Only when she
’d realized that she was dawdling in his kitchen, obviously killing time in the hope he’d turn up with explanations and declarations and all the rest of the things she’d imagined he’d do ten years ago, too, and he hadn’t, had she forced herself to drive back over to Gran Harriet’s in the ratty old car that she’d been borrowing this week, telling anyone who asked—and a few who hadn’t—that she’d sleep here through the wedding, the better to be right on hand as maid of honor.

How
thoughtful of you to be such a rock for your sister,
Gran Harriet had said placidly, eyeing Emmy over the top of her Kindle screen.

I
’m nothing if not thoughtful,
Emmy had replied. Through her teeth.

She convinced herself that
she was fine. She’d head home on Monday as planned and wasn’t that great? She’d finally had a full-fledged fling. She’d finally burst out of her sheltered little bubble and lived a little. Surely all the strange things she was feeling was nothing more than joy
.
Pure, unadulterated, excruciatingly painful
joy.

Even when
Griffin had failed to show up for the Grans’ party that next night, she didn’t fall apart, or torture herself with a thousand images of what was very likely keeping him away.

Something came up with his business,
his mother had said, not that Emmy had been loitering near the appetizers for the express purpose of eavesdropping on that conversation, because that would be crazy.
He’s sorry to miss out, but he’ll be here for the wedding on Saturday.

Part of being as fine as she was, Emmy told herself, was that she
didn’t
get as drunk as she wanted after hearing that and she
didn’t
render herself paralytic when the day before the wedding dragged on by and he didn’t so much as shoot her a text. No one else might realize the heroics involved in behaving as if she was the same old Emmy she’d always been, if dolled up in a bridesmaid’s dress and wearing too much makeup
,
but she knew exactly how hard this was.

It sat in her stomach like lead.

She didn’t see him at the ceremony, conducted on Gran Harriet’s wide back stairs under hastily erected heat lamps in the biting cold, and she told herself she didn’t look once. Or only looked once. She wore her dahlia-colored dress and she arranged Margery’s train to look pretty and she smiled.

She smiled through the ceremony.
She smiled while Margery and Philip kissed and everybody cheered. She smiled through all the interminable pictures and she sat at the high table and picked at her dinner and smiled all the more. She toasted her sister and made Margery teary in a good way, for once, and then the dancing started and it was time, she decided, to drink.

Heavily and plentifully.
And if she started hitting on the groomsmen or woke up face down beneath one of the tables, oh well. No one could say she hadn’t done her job as maid of honor first. She marched over to the caterer and liberated a bottle of white wine, and then she settled herself down in a far corner of the tent, where she could feel the wind from outside and where, if she was lucky, no one would see her become very, very drunk.

She tipped the bottle to her mouth and was about to take a
long, hard swig when it was gently removed from her possession.

“
Easy, killer. That’s a nasty headache waiting to happen.”

Griffin, of course.
Because life was cruel and he was worse.

Emmy
didn’t want to look up at him, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

Shit,
she thought helplessly as her eyes moved up over all of his magnificence packed tight into a perfectly fitted dark suit. Only the faintest hint of a tattoo poked out from the cuff of one sleeve, and on the back of his neck, and her curse was that it made her burn for him. His green eyes were brighter than she remembered and his muscles seemed harder and she wished she’d never heard of Griffin Hyatt. She wished she could reach inside her head and excise him, just like that.

Instead, she smiled, because they
’d never promised each other anything and if he wanted to get back with his fiancée, he should. And because she’d been smiling all day long. What was one more?

“
How’s Celia?” she asked. “Did you all have fun catching up?”

“
Yes,” he said, the wine bottle dangling from one hand and his gaze a hard thing on hers. “It was a delightful trip down memory lane. Because what’s better than looking up from the woman you love to see the woman who left you?”

She couldn
’t possibly have heard that right.

“
Yeah, that’s what I said,” he threw at her, a little belligerently, she thought. “I love you, Emmy. And I know you love me. You’ve loved me since you were a kid. You’re ruined for all other men and I hope I haunt you forever, I really do.”